Marcel Proust

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.

It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms, one would not part.

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been 'great changes.'

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.